INTERNET geeks have a new weapon to launch their assault on the World Wide Web. This one is smarter, faster and fully loaded and is called Firefox3. While regular Firefox users had no reason to complain about the earlier version, Mozilla has made life a little better with the latest offering—over 17 million users have downloaded it since the launch earlier this month. But what are the the applications—there are hundreds of them to choose from—that make Internet Explorer’s latest headache so special?

The top five features
PIC LENS: This one takes the cake, though it’s not a new feature. Pics Lens transforms image search into a 3D experience—it’s like taking a stroll through a gallery of the images you searched for, just pull close the ones you like and push back the ones you don’t, ala Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Though you’d still prefer to search the old fashioned Google way, this is a great tool to play around with. As default it shows you latest video releases in listed sites.

EASY GESTURES: This one is for the proverbial couch—er Net—potato who doesn’t want to move even his mouse. Install the feature and everything you want to do is at the tip of your mouse literally, you don’t have to budge an inch. Takes some getting used to though.

FAST DIAL/SPEED DIAL: Have to credit this feature to the Opera browser, which had it at least a year ago. It works like the speed dial of your phone: no need to type the URLs of your favourite site or go to the bookmarks. Just add the links to the slots and click the screens shots for direct access to the sites.

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